Thoughts on degrammaticalization

On degrammaticalization: Controversial points and possible explanations

“…Ramat (1992) collected a series of such exceptions and, with the provocative title Thoughts on degrammaticalization, a paraphrase of Lehmann's (1995Lehmann's ( [1982) pioneering book on grammaticalization, was the first to publish a study explicitly devoted to counter-directional changes (see also Giacalone Ramat 1998: 115-118). The same line of reasoning is continued by van der Auwera (2002: 26), who believes that degrammaticalization "should be studied in its own right and not as a quirky, accidental exception to grammaticalization".…”

“…Change from inflectional or derivational morpheme to independent lexeme -Development of the abessive morpheme taga into an independent word via cliticization in the Enontekiö dialect of Lappish (Nevis 1986a;Joseph and Janda 1988: 200) -Detachment of the first-person plural ending -muid into an independent pronoun "we" in Irish (Bybee et al 1994: 13-14;Giacalone Ramat 1998: 115;Newmeyer 2001: 208) -Upgrading of the first-person plural ending -mos into an independent pronoun nos 'we' in some regional varieties of Spanish (Janda 1995) -Development of the Proto-Semitic accusative marker -Vt into a preposition ʔet in Modern Hebrew (Rubino 1994;Newmeyer 2001: 208) -Development of the Japanese adversative suffix -ga into a free adversative conjunction (Matsumoto 1988;Newmeyer 2001: 213) -Free use of inflectional or derivational morphemes such as English ism, ade, teens, bus, pro, anti, ex, hood, Dutch tig, Italian anta, Basque kume, talde toki, tasun, discussed below in Section 4.3 (Ramat 1987, Ramat 1992Trask 1997;Giacalone Ramat 1998: 115;Newmeyer 2001: 209) Moreover, Janda (2001) reports a number of phenomena which, rather than representing the reversed change from one category to another in the lexemeto-affix cline, show a development within the very same category that in some ways seems to be inconsistent with grammaticalization; the features of this inconsistency will be more precisely illustrated in Section 4.…”

“…They are economically motivated … All this tension and flux between grammar and lexicon is amenable to the constantly shifting balance along a spiral path (the *Spirallauf der Sprachgeschichte already alluded to by von der Gabelentz 1901: 255) between the least-effort principle, leading to phonetically reduced and opaque labels, and the transparency principle, which strives toward an optimal one-to-one relation between form and meaning." (Ramat 1992: 557) 8 Unlike Ramat (1992), however, I do not consider there to be degrammaticalization in the case of a morpheme that has lost its grammatical status and lexicalizes, as in Italian signore 'sir', which goes back to the Latin comparative senior(em), or in German die Verwandten 'relatives', whose basic verb verwenden has acquired a different sense ('to use'). Moreover, Ramat (1992: 551) claimed that "we are faced with a second instance of degrammaticalization when an entire morphological category disappears or a class-formation system ceases to be productive", as in the case of the Greek dual or of the Proto-Indo-European inchoative suffix *-sḱ-underlying forms such as German forschen 'to search, investigate', which are no longer analyzed synchronically as inchoative formations.…”

On the relationship between subjectification, grammaticalisation and constructions

“…Burridge 1998;Traugott 2001;Hopper and Traugott 2003), while yet others claim that grammaticalisation is bidirectional (e.g. Ramat 1992;Campbell 2001;Nuyts 2001).…”

Grammaire et dictionnaire : le parti pris des mots

“…Ce cadre est particulièrement apte à rendre compte des faits d'auxiliarisation, de l'évolution des morphèmes de négation et des indéfinis et du renouvellement des articulateurs temporels, logiques ou discursifs (Traugott & Heine 1991, Lehmann, 1995, Marchello-Nizia, 2006. Les travaux menés autour de la grammaticalisation se doublent plus récemment de l'étude des mécanismes de dégrammaticalisation (Norde, 2009), par quoi le morphème grammatical revient au lexical, selon un processus qui n'est pas si exceptionnel qu'on l'a dit, dans un premier temps (Ramat, 1992), en affirmant l'unidirectionnalité de la grammaticalisation. De même, les études récentes portant sur le développement de la prédication complexe, dans le cadre de la linguistique fonctionnaliste américaine, tendent à dégager un mouvement cyclique du lexical au grammatical puis au lexical, qui aboutirait à la création de verbes lexicaux complexes, selon un mouvement général parataxe-syntaxelexique (Givon, 2009) 12 .…”